Browsing the "Curtain Call" Category

By John Farrell Does Shakespeare need help? Better Than Shakespeare certainly thinks so. For its inaugural production Much Ado About Something they have taken Much Ado About Nothing, kept much of the comedy, and added an [&hellip... Read More→

By John Farrell The Last Remnants of Cops, Robbers & Hollywood Cowboys doesn’t depend on fancy theatrics for its considerable charm. Based on short stories by writer-director Tom Cavanaugh, the play has little action, with actors taking [&hellip... Read More→

By John Farrell The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde’s incredibly witty play about the antics of a couple of British gentlemen in love in the 1890’s. It seems to be as heterosexual as a play [&hellip... Read More→

By John Farrell Before there were any Fringe Festivals — well before the first Edinburgh Fringe Festival — there were plays that should have been in a festival, plays that started small and grew big and [&hellip... Read More→

By John Farrell It’s time again for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, the celebration of all things theatrical that has become an annual rite for theater fans, for theater performers, and for over-worked stage crews. It began [&hellip... Read More→

By John Farrell Friends Like These is writer Gregory Crafts’ visceral look at one group of students at a local high school who you know are doomed from the start. The play begins with reports of a [&hellip... Read More→

By John Farrell Other Desert Cities got a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2012. It must have been for the witty and sometimes biting dialog because the play is nothing but talk: often humorous, often witty talk, [&hellip... Read More→

By a strange coincidence, 1994 gave birth to two separate fictional retellings of the results-fixing scandal at the 1950s game show Twenty One. The first was Richard Greenberg’s play Night and Her Stars. Months later came [&hellip... Read More→

By John Farrell Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was crying out to be made into a musical after Jekyl and Hyde and many other Victorian classics were produced with varied success. Dorian’s Descent, the world premier at [&hellip... Read More→

By John Farrell King Lear is one of the great jewels in Shakespeare’s crown. It is a play that mixes political intrigue with the declining rule of a king, tragedy of the most touching sort with ambitions [&hellip... Read More→